Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Shay (00:00):
I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through what I went through. The level of pain and suffering, you know, that I’ve been through to get to this point, you know, the cancer was the real kind of, I’ve had a few knocks at the door and I didn’t listen. And then I got this knock at the door with cancer. Well, I thought I listened, but not fully. And then I got this kind of knock at the door and it was like, Yeah, I just, like I said, I just had to open my heart up to it because, yeah, I just knew that there was something bigger and greater in terms of an experience of myself in this world, in this life that I wanted to get in touch with because I wasn’t done yet. You know, I didn’t feel like it was my time.

Guy (00:53):
Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome to my podcast. My beautiful guest today is Shay Kelly. I first got to know Shay when she attended our retreat. I do listen to my podcast on a regular basis. The one thing I like to do from time to time is bring in people that have experience in our work and also how it’s impacting their lives in some way, which I think is very important because it takes all this mystical and different elements of this work that can feel so fractal sometimes and actually bring it into a practical application and see that it actually helps and supports people on their journey. Shea has been and continues to be on one hell of a journey. She’s an incredible brave soul and I’m very proud to be able to bring you this podcast today where she shares from the heart so beautifully and authentically. No matter where you are in your life, whether you’re vibrant, full of health, and you’re just out there searching for more, or you have a health crisis yourself or some problem, there is so much to take from Shae’s podcast today. So I certainly hope you enjoy it. And of course, if it does impact your life, please share it with a loved one or friend to help them inspire them in some way too. Anyway, can you tell I’m adlibbing all this? Links are below if you want to find out more about what we do from free meditations to retreats to workshops etc etc and of course yeah enjoy this with Shay. Drop me a comment, let me know what you think. Really appreciate it. Much love. See you soon. Welcome.

Shay (02:32):
Hi.

Guy (02:33):
And I now know that you’ve been working with us for about 12 months, not 18 after the first effort round. And I find it fascinating from how people perceive the work, because clearly, there’s been a lot of changes. You put in the practices, you put in the work daily. How are people from the outside looking in, seeing the changes within you, and do they ask you what’s been going on? I sometimes think that people don’t understand the work and when you say you’ve been to a retreat, you’ve been involved in a self-mastery program that we do, you come into Portugal, people might go, are you like part of a cult? What are you doing over there? But for us, it feels very normal and there’s a deep understanding of the wisdom of the work. So there is a question in there. How has that been for you?

Shay (03:30):
Yeah, great question. I do, a couple of my really close friends make a big joke about how I’ve joined a cult and that I’m in training to become a cult leader, which we laugh about quite often, but I’m able to kind of have those conversations with that level of humor with these particular friends. They’re very close, I consider them like my tribal family, I guess, and I can be quite candid and open with them about what I’ve been experiencing and the kind of journey that I’ve been on since connecting with Living Flow. And some of them are really quite open to what’s been happening for me. Others, they’re a little bit shut off to the kind of bigger sort of super conscious mind experiences. That’s a bit out there for them. But undeniably, they notice a change in me, particularly those who have watched my journey closely over the last couple of years. And everybody’s just really happy for me that I’ve found something that I can anchor into so firmly that it gives me a sense of self-empowerment back over you know, some pretty tumultuous kind of situations that I’ve been faced in the last couple of years. So most of my friends kind of look on with awe and they go like, what are you doing? You know, they say you look really well, you sound really well, you know, they can’t believe how much I’m achieving physically and just the way I’m sort of approaching life now. So they notice those things and yeah, they ask me about it. They say, what are you doing? And I’ll tell anybody that listens, you know, like what I’m doing. It gets like that, doesn’t it? Yeah. And there’s actually been a few of my friends connect with Living Flow and go along to some one of the one day workshops and some of the online programs. Yeah.

Guy (05:41):
They did, didn’t they? In Ocean Shores, I believe.

Shay (05:43):
Yeah. Yeah. And then a few other friends have connected on the online. uh via the app and done the four-week program others have done the seven-day meditation and they’re just like wow i get texts all the time saying thanks for introducing me to this work it’s awesome

Guy (06:01):
Amazing well you’re an incredible ambassador because what i love about you shay is that you you just go about and you do the work you know our job as facilitators i feel is to be able to share To be like guidance and mentor and share the wisdom that has impacted our lives and be able to pass wisdom on for others. But unless we do something with that wisdom, nothing happens. I think that’s where the rubber meets the road and if we embrace it and turn up for ourselves each day, just day by day, bit by bit. Then, then the results begin to show up, which is really important. The question I had for you then with that is let’s let’s go back before living, you heard of us. Did you, were you aware that this work was around? Had you looked into it? Because obviously, maybe we should go into your story and where, you know, some of the challenges you’ve been through. Because I’m wondering where the tipping point was for you to go, I need to lean into this, or I’m ready to lean into this.

Shay (07:09):
Yep, 100%. I think like broad spectrum I’ve always been connected to spirituality and energy. I think going back to childhood that was sort of evident growing up with my mom, who was right into meditation and actually sent me off to a meditation course when I was about 18 or so. And yeah, she’s very cool. And, you know, she had us doing things like drawing on the left side of the brain. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that book, but that alongside our school homework, things like that. And, you know, she did things like, we did like the liver cleansing diet and stuff like that when we were younger, and she also bought all of like Tony Robbins’ tapes and things like that, so I would listen to them on and off. I had books like Wayne Dyer and Causing Miracles and things that I would wouldn’t read them cover to cover but I’d read sections of them as a teenager and in my early 20s and I just felt like aligned with that way of thinking although what I’ve come to realize is that everything like I thought that I was sort of living my life from my heart and being open and all the stuff that like I would read in these books and sort of experience I guess the bigger concepts and the deeper stuff just felt like a metaphorical thing, you know? And I thought like, I don’t know if that’s achievable for me, or if I need to be at that level, or maybe there’s some untapped potential, but I’m not sure. And I think I’ve always had sort of a deeper knowing that there’s sort of something greater, but I haven’t been you know, I haven’t been connected with religion or anything like that. I’ve been on a very much of my own journey with that and I’ve always felt very connected to myself, or I thought I was, and then, and particularly nature. I’ve had some pretty sort of profound experiences in nature that, you know, have just helped me sort of know that you know, there is something bigger than myself and there is a deeper intuition. And I can, you know, it’s available to me if I tap into it. So I’ve kind of had that in the background a little bit. So it wasn’t completely foreign to me. But certainly when I came to the retreat, I had, I signed straight up to a five day retreat. I had not been to a one day workshop. I had not been online to look at your free seven day meditation. I considered going to a three-day one but I knew that I needed something more so I just stepped straight in the deep end.

Guy (10:17):
How did you hear about Live & Flow and where were you at with yourself, your health and everything at that time as well because I think we should explore that for sure.

Shay (10:29):
Cool. I heard about Live & Flow via a sponsored ad on Facebook.

Guy (10:35):
Wow.

Shay (10:36):
Yeah, that’s when I first saw it and at the time I was recovering from I think about my third or fourth round of chemotherapy for a very serious diagnosis of cancer and I had just come out. I’d spent five days in hospital with temperatures of 39.9 degrees for multiple days and about three days in a row and it was very scary time and my oncologist, once the sort of fever broke and I was a bit more conscious and able to kind of take some stuff in, my oncologist at the time was saying that he wasn’t sure at that stage whether cancer or chemo was killing me. And I had no immune system, had no read in blood work of any neutrophils or white blood cells. I had some kind of virus and really not sure what it was. And we needed to have a break from the chemotherapy. So I was pretty much on bed rest and yeah, came across the living flu.

Guy (11:51):
How long had you been taking chemotherapy? And he said he wasn’t sure if it was the cancer or the chemo that was killing you by that point.

Shay (11:57):
Yeah, I had been on chemotherapy. I started on International Women’s Day, the 8th of March 2021, and I was having chemotherapy every three weeks. And I ended up in hospital after my third cycle. And that was in early May 2021. So I’d been on chemo for almost two months at that stage.

Guy (12:30):
And when did you come to the retreat?

Shay (12:33):
August of the following year, August 2022. Right. Yeah.

Guy (12:43):
Did you, when you were diagnosed with cancer, how long after were you getting the treatment? Like what was, what did they say to you at that point? Yeah. And I know this might sound like a stupid question, but did it come to a shock to you when you were diagnosed at the time?

Shay (13:00):
Yes. It’s a weird thing. It came as a shock, but I knew that something was wrong. I had been having swelling in my left leg for a couple of months, coming and going. I’d been going through a really rocky period with a relationship, which ended, which was great, but it was very difficult. But looking back now, that was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. And I was also stepping up into my boss’s role at work, so I was doing some very high-level senior management work, and I just didn’t want to fuck it all up and have this leg get in the way of of, you know, me achieving more and more. And anyway, I finally went to the doctor about it and she sent me off for some blood tests and the very next day, that was a Thursday, the very next day she rang me at about 4.30 in the afternoon and I’d been working from home and I was just driving down to Evans Head to take my dog for a walk on the beach and I was about 10 minutes away from arriving And the doctor called and said, there’s some inflammation markers that are quite high in your blood work and I’d like you to, I’ve organized a CT scan at Lismore Base Hospital and I need you to get up there now and do that. And I said, yeah, yeah, cool, no worries. I’m just about to take my dog for a walk on the beach. Can I do that? And she said, are you by yourself? And I said, yes. And she said, no, absolutely not. We’re very concerned that you’ve got a blood clot and you need to get to hospital immediately. So I was like, oh, okay. So I turned around, took my dog home, got up to the hospital and they grabbed me from the waiting room, put me straight into a CT and then kept me in a room in the emergency for about five hours. Eventually I went for a little walk to find the doctor and and said, I’m pretty hungry, can I have a sandwich and what’s going on? And so that was about 11 o’clock at night and it was right at the time where I think we’d been going through almost a year of COVID and you had to wear masks in hospital. So the doctor came in and we’re all wearing masks and I could just see in his eyes that something was wrong. And I just said to him, just tell me, just, you know, it’s okay. And he said he was struggling to get the words out. And he said we could take our masks off because he just needed to connect with me more. And that was just such a barrier. And he was struggling to say it, and I just said, it’s cancer, isn’t it? And then he said, it’s, we don’t know, but you have enlarged lymph glands floating around in places where they shouldn’t be, and it’s throughout my abdomen. and it’s either going to be some kind of crazy autoimmune disorder or cancer. It’s going to be one of those two but we don’t know yet, we need to biopsy those lymph nodes to really find out. So that was at like nearly midnight on a Friday night and they wanted to admit me and I said I wanted to go home And luckily enough, the doctor that I was seeing was on shift the next day, starting at 8.30. So he said, yes, you go home, hug your dog, do whatever you need to do, but come back here at 8.30 tomorrow morning and, you know, we’re going to get to work investigating this. So that then commenced a two-week cycle of every test and probe under the sun. I was admitted for a whole week into hospital while they ran all those tests. They did eventually biopsy the lymph nodes and on the 3rd of February 2021, the generalist specialist that I was under, once I was admitted, came into my room on his own without his entourage of people, so I knew he had sort of bad news that he was coming in by himself. and he said you have advanced stage four metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of unknown primary. We don’t know where your original tumor is and we need to find it because you know you’ve got months. This is, yeah, this is very very serious. It could be months. Yeah, yeah, we don’t know how long you have. At that stage it was like, you won’t be making Christmas. That’s pretty much how they put it. And they kept me in hospital for a few more days. I had like, scans where they put cameras down everywhere and they were coming up not able to find anything. They went back through all my health records via my GP and eventually they let me go home but then they treated me like an outpatient and every second day I had to come back for a new procedure. My left kidney was not operating at its optimal level, so I had to have a special test to see that capacity, the capacity of that kidney, and it was running at about 35%. And then I was in for a surgery to put a stent in to help that kidney out. Yeah, and it all just took off from there. Eventually, when I got into the oncologist, which was about the 17th of February. He sent me off for one more investigative surgery. They were thinking at that stage that the cancer had started on my ureter, which is the tube that connects your kidney to your bladder. There was some evidence of some activity there. And yeah, this surgery didn’t find conclusive enough information for the original tumor site. And the PET scan came up with no original tumor site, but what the PET scan did show was that the cancer had spread throughout all my lymph nodes and the lymph superhighway, which is the kind of vein-like system that the lymph fluid travels along. So my entire body was lit up green like a Christmas tree. And there was also this, a lot of shady kind of activity in and around the abdomen area, that sort of, that sac that I forget the name of, that pretty much holds all our organs in place. There was lots of shady stuff in all through there. And then, so it was pretty much, I didn’t have much time between then and having to start treatment in terms of answering your earlier question. So I started treatment on the 8th of March, which is like a month after I got my official diagnosis and there was all kinds of things, like the oncologist gave me my actual prognosis, which was I wouldn’t make my birthday or Christmas that year, so without chemotherapy. My chemotherapy was palliative, so it was designed only to extend my my life and, you know, try and keep the cancer under control. It wasn’t a curative approach. I was inoperable, incurable, all these like really big confronting words. And with chemo alone, my best chances were two years at best, which, yeah, was his sort of exact words. Yeah, wow. Yeah.

Guy (20:50):
So were you actively looking for something else and that’s how you found Living Flow or were you scrolling through Facebook one day and found us? And why did you decide to come?

Shay (21:04):
I was scrolling through Facebook. I was also actively looking for something to reward myself with after chemo had finished. Um, excuse me. I thought I knew how serious that trip to hospital was when I got unwell halfway through treatment and how touch and go things were. So I thought if I survive this insane chemo regime, I want to treat myself to some kind of retreat. But I want something more than just good food, massages and a day spa, you know. Yeah, you won’t get that with us. Yeah, no. You won’t get massages and a day spa too much. Exactly. Yeah, no.

Guy (21:50):
No, we definitely want results.

Shay (21:54):
Yeah, yeah. And at the beginning of my diagnosis and before I started treatment, I really opened my heart up to the whole thing. Like I woke up one morning and I just thought, right the only way that I know how to do this is just to open my heart to the entire experience and I remember going outside in the house that I had at the time and just um stretched out looking up at the sky and going right you’ve got my attention like if there’s a different way if I need to be doing things differently like show me you know show me and all throughout my treatment I talked to my friends like oh yeah well Shazy 2.0 which was going to be like post-treatment and like being a miracle and cancer free, I want to do things differently but I had no idea what that looked like, what I was going to do differently or how or how to kind of synthesize everything that had been happening to me and make sense of it you know. So I knew that I needed some kind of retreat that was also going to be a bit of an emotional boot camp that yeah, that just gave me, connected me back to myself and into that inner power that I know that I needed and I had, but was, you know, being slowly sort of stripped away from me because of the existential crisis I was facing. So yeah, I was scrolling through Facebook. I saw just reconnected and that was enough for me to click on the link to read through the minimal information that’s offered. And I thought to myself, I’m just going to leave it at that. I’m not even going to Google these guys. I’m just going to leave it at that. And the retreat that I was going to book into was three days, but I went through the 2022 floods here in Lismore and that sort of derailed my progress a bit. So I changed it and my treatment got sort of extended out and I changed when I was coming to the August one, which was five days, which was perfect in the end because I needed those whole five days after everything I’d been through.

Guy (24:08):
Was Petra at that one? Yes, it was her first one back. Amazing. Wow, it doesn’t seem that long ago thinking about it actually.

Shay (24:16):
I know, it’s like nine months ago or something like that.

Guy (24:20):
Yeah, wow. Well, mate, your progress has been incredible. Thank you. the it’s funny I got to pick up with something I thought we were quite detailed on the sales page we’re vague but we detailed but vague we purposely don’t share with participants exactly what’s going on because we want people to lean in and finally trust and surrender you know and I always say I put my mom through it so it can’t be that bad yes you know at the end of the day she was 75 at the time yeah wow you kind of we’ll touch on this first before we get into the retreat stuff because you kind of skipped through oh and the floods happened so i delayed can you just touch a little bit what happened there as well because it literally when it rains it pours it felt like it must have felt like that for you at the time

Shay (25:08):
Yeah, yeah. Life in the last two, nearly three years has brought me to my knees in a way that I could have never anticipated or planned for. And in a lot of ways there’s there’s a lot of beauty around that. But I say that now like it’s sort of water off a duck’s back a bit, but it’s been a long road of healing for me to even get to this point. So yeah, it’s been massive. So yeah, the biggest recorded flood in Australia’s history occurred in February of 2022. And yeah, my house was right in the firing line. I had a beautiful 120-year-old Queenslander-style home that was raised off the ground already. The floor level was sort of on par with the 1 in 100 height. Water had never been inside my house. I went through the 2017 flood there with probably about another meter to go before it even entered the house, but I was surrounded by water then. So, you know, I was well prepared and well planned and I’m sort of a bit of a G.I. Jane. So, you know, I spent a couple of days preparing for that flood because I knew it was going to be big. You know, I stayed at home until I got the news that it was going to go to 12 and a half, 13 meters and then I made plans to evacuate because I knew that that would be coming inside the house and recovering. I’d only been a few months off chemo and I had barely any strength, and I have a blue heeler dog too who’s kind of a bit old, but he’s my best mate. And I knew that if we didn’t get out, that if water was coming in the house, I would probably lose him and me. The water, so my house was about two meters off the ground already and it came in over the doorways and the windows. So yeah, inside the house it was about, yeah, just over six foot in the house. In the house? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And when I left about two in the morning, I had raised everything about a meter and a half off the floor, thinking that’s how high it would come in. And I put some precious stuff in the car and I packed a bag to evacuate to my friend’s house. I actually had to drive through flood water at one of the intersections in town here at Lismore and nearly got swept away in that water in sort of a split second. The car nearly stalled and saved it by a whisker of stalling and made it through that water. But that was my only way sort of out of the basin, so to speak, otherwise I’d have to sort of turn around and go and watch my house go under. Some neighbors of mine sent me footage of the following day and yeah, my roof was sort of sticking up out of, you know, water was here and the roof, pitch of the roof was sort of sticking out there. So, utterly heartbreaking, mate, but cancer really prepared me well for letting go. I’d done so much surrendering and so much letting go. in the months leading up to that, that the fact that I was safe and my Blue Heeler was safe, you know, yeah, but I was rattled. I was very stressed. My nervous system has been to hell and back in the last couple of years and that, you know, really shook me again to my core. But yeah,

Guy (28:50):
Yeah, no, I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it. Now, there’s something else you haven’t mentioned, which I want to raise. Only that, because I remember, I think it was Stacey who works with, who helps us, reached out and said, oh, there’s a lady that wants to come to the retreat, but needs to use a lymphatic pump. twice a day and she’s concerned that if if you’re in the processes or whatever or how it would work i mean like yeah absolutely get her in there let’s let’s figure out how we can how we can make it happen so if i if i’m not mistaken your leg would swell to the point where you’d have to use a pump twice a day yes to reduce swelling yes the side effects of the chemo

Shay (29:33):
both the chemo and the cancer. So it’s a cancer related injury further injured by the high levels of chemotherapy. So I was on two different types of chemo and I received two years of chemo in a six month period. So yeah, I was absolutely blasted. And they were hoping that the swelling situation in the leg that first alerted the doctors that something was wrong and got me diagnosed in the first instance, they were hoping that that would go away the more that they reduce the cancer. But in fact, I’ve ended up with what’s known as secondary lymphedema and the pumping action within that lymphatic superhighway is basically broken and that lymphatic superhighway pumps lymphatic fluid up and into your chest cavity where it drains back into the vein system and then finds its way out of the body. So gravity’s kind of against me because my lymphatic system doesn’t pump on its own, it needs the support of muscles and um, customized compression garments. Yes, and at the time that I was coming to live in Flow, I think I was in my first custom garment, which wasn’t the right fit. It’s taken four custom garments for me to get the right level of compression and the right sort of sizing to help keep my leg, um, yeah hopefully we’re moving into a maintenance phase essentially but for the last two years it’s been like four steps forward three steps back with that whole condition and learning about how to manage it and what I need to do to kind of manually get rid of the lymphatic fluid and part of that process is using this pneumatic pump um that’s got both my legs go into it’s got a side for each leg and it comes up around my waist and um it sequentially gets tighter and tighter and tighter starting at my feet and tries to manually push the lymph fluid up so at that point I was pumping twice a day which I still do often now but now with the better level of compression garment that I have um I can get away with pumping just just once a day every now and then so But at the time, yeah, at the time I came to the retreat I was very self-conscious. It’s changed, lymphedema has changed the way my body looks and works and operates and that’s had an effect on my yeah, on my level of self-confidence and what I’m capable of. And yeah, I was very nervous about bringing the pump in and getting, I know you’ve got to, yeah, you’ve got to sort of share your living space and I wasn’t sure how that would be for somebody else. And yeah.

Guy (32:32):
But that went well?

Shay (32:33):
Yes, it went great. Yeah, Lucy was very accepting and accommodating and yeah.

Guy (32:40):
yeah well if i remember i think it was the last day or the day before was the first time you’d woke up and without the pump like you because you thought the swelling had gone down at that particular point

Shay (32:51):
Yeah, yeah, I had a really, really profound experiences in the processes there at the retreat. And I noticed, and that was my first introduction to that sort of energy medicine work can can help this condition. And that’s probably, you know, been one of my motivating factors for continuing on with the work. also the self-development side of things, the personal growth side of things as well has been a bonus. But really I’m trying to cure lymphedema, which they’ve told me is impossible to cure, only gets worse. And what I experienced there on the retreat was a significant reduction in the size and circumference of my leg. And in fact, I was measured by my OT about a week, 10 days after the retreat. and I’d lost about 11.7 centimeters off my entire leg at all the different measuring points that she took. So since I’d seen her before I’d gone in, so I thought that was like pretty 12 centimeters, that’s a lot of fluid. And I did notice during the retreat that I was starting to go to the toilet a lot more. So actually that’s how I learned that lymphatic fluid finds any which way it can to try and get out of your system if it can’t use its normal channel. And what actually makes the limb swell, a lot of people who’ve had breast cancer get lymphedema in their arm or if they’ve had cancer where there’s been lymph nodes removed. They can get lymphedema that way, but I never had any surgery, so it was the cancer itself and the treatment that broke my lymphatics. But what makes the limb enlarge is that the lymphatic system tries to use the capillaries to escape the body. which are even smaller than the lymph superhighway. And so you’ve got this really thick, protein-rich fluid trying to make its way through what they call the baccharides, which is the skin capillaries. It gets into the skin, it interacts chemically with the skin and turns into fat. And so that’s what kind of, it’s fluid that sits in the skin unable to escape and that changes its composition. So yeah, a lot goes into managing it. And I had some pretty remarkable experiences on the retreat. I woke up on the last morning, I could see my kneecap, my leg looked more normal than it had ever looked since first being diagnosed. And I was just so blown away at the capacity of energy medicine to help me in this way.

Guy (35:45):
It’s nuts, isn’t it? Because once you have an experience like that, nobody can take that away from you. And it allows you to ask the question, well, what else is possible? If I’ve just experienced that by coming together with a group of strangers for five days, and working on ourselves you know because we’re a big believer of the power that creates the body can heal the body like the only at the end of the day but it’s allowing ourselves I see it as getting out of our own way to a degree to allow what truly wants to reorganize itself because the body has that innate intelligence within us yeah it’s like how do we encourage that innate intelligence to recreate the homeostasis or the health that is our natural state. Yeah 100% Energy medicine we speak about because do you share or talk about that experience because how would you share it with someone listening to this that maybe hasn’t even been to a retreat because I’ll touch on it a little bit and explain, but we hold group coherent pods or circles or whatever you want to call them, where we actually have been spending three nights, two nights, or four nights preparing ourselves to get to the point where we can actually use energy. and it’s very tangible right you know it’s not metaphorical it’s not like reading a book and you talk about things it’s it’s a very tangible thing how would you share your experience by receiving that intention that energy and surrendering to it the experience you had how do you describe it normally to people if they ever ask

Shay (37:31):
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think I’m still finding my way with how to explain that and I fumble through it, but I just try and stay sort of genuine to the experiences that that I had particularly on the retreat and that I’ve had since with exploring the superconscious mind and particularly using breathwork to sort of transgress the nervous system to get move the ego out of the way to just fully let go and surrender. So I would say that there is a science behind this stuff and when you look at things like neuroscience, breathwork, and even a lot of the ancient kind of wisdoms and practices and something that I’ve been getting into since the retreat, which is Reiki. I’ve tried to teach myself how to use the energy for my own healing benefits to continue, that’s been part of my continuing the work for myself. But in terms of explaining it to others, I’m like You can feel it. I certainly can. I can feel it in my body. There is just like this clearness that just everything just kind of moves away and different parts of my body sort of pop off like or register and then I send a lot of just Just breath to that to that area and Once I just kind of focus on on that and just breathing sort of life to those different areas of my body that that might be you know sending out a bit of a signal whether that’s pain or discomfort or little kind of nervy tweaky sensations stuff starts to move and shift and I feel it. It’s a physical sensation. And then I’ve witnessed enough now with the size of my leg being impacted after an experience of an energy medicine session, whether that’s like a sound healing session that Matt does, or whether it’s a Reiki session with my Reiki master, or, you know, no matter what sort of it is, I have been taking photographs and tracking the progress of my legs, sort of before and after. And after the retreat, I started a social media page called Lymphomaniac. And I put stuff up there, like my legs are all over the internet now, thanks to that page which has been very confronting for me but also healing in itself. And I have been saying things like hashtag energy medicine works on photographs of my leg of like before and after. At the beginning of this year I spent five days going to the Spirit Festival in Bangalore here and I did every sound healing breath work hypnotherapy session, I could there for five days. And it was like being back at the retreat where it’s just like a psychological and emotional and spiritual boot camp. And I had big shifts in my leg once again. And it’s not to say that I’m healed and it’s fixed. it, you know, it comes back, it fluctuates, it comes and goes, but this is something that’s part of my toolkit now in terms of managing it and I am aiming high. A lot of my friends do refer to me as a bit of an overachiever, particularly to go from zero to stage four cancer, you know, they make a joke about how overachieving that is. We can laugh about it, which is good. But it is on my list of goals to send this lymphedema into remission and to fix my lymphatic system with my super conscious mind. And I wake up every morning and I check to see if it’s fixed. And, you know, sometimes that has gotten me down, but more recently I’ve been working on letting go of the outcome, like setting the intentions there, doing the work, doing what I know works with meditation, breathing, plus also my physical stuff that I have to do to look after my leg well, and then just letting go of any attachment to whatever the outcome is at all.

Guy (41:54):
I really believe we have to love ourselves unconditionally and all those parts and all that i would get a lot of back pain just through physical trauma from younger and there’s times i find myself getting frustrated and that frustration then feeds a response within my body that is not supporting my healing yes definitely long term and you know so we we have to go and that’s where the practices come in so strongly and powerfully is that if we if we allow ourselves to get beyond the emotion we practice becoming the awareness becoming the observer becoming the witness to what is and be able to hold a space of compassion and love because our body is just wanting to communicate with us and let us know something isn’t right here let’s work you know work on it to reveal itself so we can and there’s so much wisdom if we get out of our own way but it’s so hard when we’re in challenges pain difficulty you know we can either feed the beast or we can starve it and then send it give it a very different signal definitely where is your cancer at right now like you’ve been monitoring it

Shay (43:06):
Yeah, it’s probably worth mentioning before I say that is when I was diagnosed and given all my treatment options, they put on the table this offer of a drug called immunotherapy and because they couldn’t find my original primary site, getting access to the immunotherapy via the pharmaceutical benefits scheme and Medicare was off the table. So they said, look, this is your best chance at surviving longer than two years, but it’s going to cost you between $60,000 and $75,000. And at the time when I got that news, it was also straight after I got my prognosis, I kind of just, yeah, left, vacated. And very gratefully, I had one of my bestest friends in the room with me at the oncologist there, and they said, you know, what would immunotherapy do for Shay? And the oncologist said, you know, it could be the difference of five years, you know, and potentially more. But sort of once you get to five years, they sort of, from a stage four, they sort of go, you know, anything beyond that’s bloody great because, you know, you weren’t even meant to last out the year. So I didn’t even think how the hell was I didn’t have that money on hand. I couldn’t even think practically of how to get it at the time. And in the days following that, my friends got together and put a crowdfunding thing together for me. I was going to draw down on my super or borrow extra money against my mortgage. I was thinking practically that way, how to do it. And all my friends said, no, we want to help. So let’s just put this together and see what happens. Even if we can get half of it or a third, it will help because everybody wants to help you, Shay. And so I got brave and I said, OK, because that also meant putting my story out there. Um, and publicly and in four days I raised $60,000. Yeah. And that was that process in and of itself is the greatest lesson and display of, of how loved and appreciated and valued I am. And I’ve. realized I’d grown up my whole life feeling completely unlovable and unworthy. And now I know that I’m not. And if ever I am, I read the list of all my investors, there’s 306 of them, and they all left little comments and notes for me. So whenever I’m feeling down, I read that list and particularly on my hardest days through treatment, I would read the comments and I would keep fighting for all my investors. So I’m so grateful to have had that experience. It’s been incredible. So in terms of where my cancer is at now, The official terminology is that I’m stable and under control. You can’t really go from a stage four diagnosis to no cancer or remission. They’re pretty reluctant to use those terms.

Guy (46:33):
Even if they don’t find it?

Shay (46:35):
So, well, within a particular timeframe. So, and it’s different for everyone. So because my cancer was spread so far through my lymphatic system, the fact that it wasn’t in my bones or other organs was a miracle in itself. And that’s what they were trying to essentially do with the chemo was to stop it spreading. So I’ve had three PET scans since finishing chemo. technically they have come back clear, but they’re clear with a caveat. There is still some of that shady stuff that I was talking about that’s kind of in that area that houses all of our organs in the abdomen. There’s still some blobs of shady stuff there. My most recent PET scan I had The one before that I had sort of a big croissant shape looking shady spot up between my spleen and my diaphragm and that’s now just like three sort of blobs. So my oncologist has to treat, even though that stuff hasn’t got enough cellular activity firing off for it to pop off green on the PET scan, they have to treat it as if it’s disease because it’s having a response to treatment. and we were hoping that I would get off the immunotherapy next month, but because I still have these shady spots there and they are still changing and reacting with the treatment, it’s very likely I probably won’t ever get off immunotherapy. Yeah, so I’m stable and under control. And, you know, I’m sort of two years into this journey now. And when I get to that five year mark, um, you know, the best thing that they would be able to say to me is no evidence detected officially, and that will be my version of remission. And that’s what, yeah, that’s the, the, the goal I’m going for.

Guy (48:34):
Yeah, well, even from the Shea where I first met you in person to the Shea I see before me now, you know, you can see the progress in you, like it’s unbelievable and I’m sure with your determination that you have and your commitment to yourself more than anything else, then anything’s possible. I believe that anyway. Thank you.

Shay (49:01):
I believe that too.

Guy (49:03):
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we come into a close to the podcast and I think about the people listening to this podcast that are generally probably experienced our work, maybe come to a one-day workshop. They might have jumped on Zoom or they might be somewhere else in the world that just listens to podcasts. I have no idea. I actually don’t know. All I know is that we get thousands of listens. Sadly, the internet disconnects you even though that’s why I’m so passionate about getting back in front of people, which is what we do now. How would you describe to them, like how has Living Flow supported you? Because obviously we have a online component. We don’t tend to talk about that so much, but we have an inner self mastery. So the idea of what we look at was myself, Matt and Petra work together. We do the retreats, which are very submersive. They’re very experiential. We can cover a huge amount of ground in three nights or five nights, but ultimately, it’s enough to ideally kickstart and allow people to get more passionate about the work and incorporate it in our daily life. And then we do the online component, the Inner Self Mastery, which is stretched over where we have weekly meet catch-ups on Zoom or monthly catch-ups on Zoom or whatever that might be. So we can then have support to integrate the work as we move, but staying connected as a community and having people that truly get it, that understand, I think that’s the key, because then you can truly be yourself, no filter. And it doesn’t matter because we’re all we’re all there for the same reasons, right? Yeah. So I think what I’d like to ask you is how has they supported you? Because ultimately, you’re doing the work, you’re doing everything. We’re here just as guides and mentors and to be able to lean on when needed. Yeah, that’s my question.

Shay (51:07):
Okay, I think for me the Living Flow stuff has supported me Yeah, I can’t fully put into words just the full impact of it, but it’s been totally, like this is cliche, but it’s totally been life changing for me. And like I was saying earlier in the podcast, it’s given me power back. I’ve been sort of subjecting my body and my life to these medical professionals and people that, you know, you can say you do this and that’ll work and do that and this will work and blah, blah, blah. And I sort of played that game for a while and this work and living flow has just enabled me to get back in touch with who I really am and what I really want and the direction that I want to take now with my life. And it’s given me the confidence to not go back, to step back into life as I knew it before I got diagnosed and just kind of carry on because experiences that I’ve had with the growth that I’ve been doing with you guys has given me enough to know that if I step back into that I’m just going to perpetuate the same cycles and the same programming and the same responses and so it gives me courage and the bravery to step more into the unknown. It makes me excited about the unknown as you mentioned, it provides a safe community where you can sort of share the big experiences that you’re having in your super conscious mind and no one’s going to sit there and go, oh, that’s a bit woo woo. Or, you know, they’re going to go, wow, amazing. You know, tell me more. And because, you know, they’re having sort of similar experiences and It’s just giving me, like I’ve been in a lot of talk therapy at different times throughout my life for other reasons, but particularly when I got diagnosed, you had to get teed up with a psychologist and stuff, and I still talk to that psychologist to this day. But the stuff with Living Flow gives me the tools to help me help myself, and I feel more empowered with that. I don’t feel like I’m sort of at the whim of of a system or a drug or the doctors or the people who think that they know better. It helps me to know better for me and advocate for myself in ways that I haven’t before in my life. Yeah, incredible.

Guy (53:50):
Thank you for sharing. It’s a joy. I just get so filled up hearing stories of yourself and knowing I played a very small part in contributing to that in some way. From being that guy that was scared to talk about this work and step out and worried about my old conditioning and my old beliefs to then finally selling my company and having the courage to lean out and just go, you know what, fuck it, I don’t care anymore. It’s too big. So to hear people like yourself sharing that, it’s just amazing. It really, selfishly as well, it warms me a lot, Shea.

Shay (54:28):
Yeah, you’ve helped me more than you know, Guy. There’s a few more things that I could tell you all help me more than you know.

Guy (54:36):
Yeah, no, thank you. I want to close a loop because you’ve mentioned it a couple of times and I can just feel people asking. How would you describe the superconscious mind?

Shay (54:48):
The superconscious mind is so free and beautiful and just, yeah, the land of bliss.

Guy (55:01):
But it’s a state where we can get to, correct?

Shay (55:03):
Yeah, 100%. We’re already there. Yeah, it’s something that I feel, just intuitively for me, that already exists in me. And it’s more than this meat skin that I get around in. It’s more than the thoughts in my head. I feel like it’s my true authentic vibe. Um, and, um, I feel like the access point to the super conscious mind is through the, um, activated breathing or particularly for me because I have a very overactive, um, mind and inner critic. So, uh, I really sort of need those tools of the breathing techniques to relax myself enough to, to slip into that state. So yeah, I love it there.

Guy (55:55):
Yeah, beautiful. Last question. For anybody listening to this that’s sitting on the fence, is curious about Living Flow, curious about our retreats, curious about our workshops, curious about our online stuff, but they’re not sure because we all understand it takes bloody balls to go, you know what, lean into the unknown a little bit. What would you say to those people listening?

Shay (56:22):
do it. Like just stop hesitating or finding reasons to delay or put it off. You know, it’s just only going to hold you back even further. I would just say trust that inner knowing and that inner voice. um because yeah that it’s really trying to open a doorway for you to to um to a potential that you don’t even know exists yet and it’s it’s better than your wildest dreams you know and um and what’s the harm in trying like you’re not going to lose anything even if you just take a little bit away with you and just give yourself that time out particularly with the retreats and be so immersive give yourself that opportunity and then just see what happens with your life after that you know You don’t have to keep doing the work like I do. It can manifest and play out in different ways for different people. But, you know, nothing changes if nothing changes. That’s a motto that I stick to pretty tightly.

Guy (57:36):
Yeah and I think the the interesting thing is about human behavior especially when from the outside looking in upon this work and i’ve heard this many times is that people think we actually have to wait till we’re in a great lot of pain or a flood has to come or we have to be diagnosed with chronic disease or or a problem and it’s like no yeah no matter where you are on the journey this work will benefit you this always grows to be hard yeah it’s like why make it harder for than what it actually needs to be yeah

Shay (58:09):
And i’m glad you said that because I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through what I went through, the level of pain and suffering, you know, that I’ve been through to get to this point. You know, the cancer was the real kind of, I’ve had a few knocks at the door and I didn’t listen. And then I got this knock at the door with cancer. Well, I thought I listened, but not fully. And then I got this kind of knock at the door and it was like, Yeah, I just, like I said, I just had to open my heart up to it because, yeah, I just knew that there was something bigger and greater in terms of an experience of myself in this world, in this life that I wanted to get in touch with because I wasn’t done yet. You know, I didn’t feel like it was my time.

Guy (58:59):
Exactly.

Shay (59:02):
Yeah thank you and you’re coming to portugal i know yes i am retreat yeah i just what made you decide to come to portugal um i wasn’t fully convinced at the retreat when you guys mentioned it i was like oh yeah i don’t think i need to do that i’ve done the five days now blah blah blah but the more that i kept diving into this work after the retreat the more that I just knew I needed to do more of it. And I’m in a position now where I’ve chosen not to go back to work and just fully dedicate the next couple of years to healing on so many levels. that it just felt like a hell yeah and I needed to just follow that and it’s also a challenge for me. I haven’t taken myself with a lymphedema condition, you know, traveling 35 hours across the other side of the world. So part of me wants to do this just to break those barriers and put my leg to the test in traveling and also being able to travel again and Yeah, it’s one of the things I really loved before getting sick and before COVID and all that. So it’s a great opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up.

Guy (01:00:26):
Yeah, well, I just want to speak to that slightly because for anyone listening who wants to join us in Portugal, we’ll be there July 10th to the 15th, 2023. The whole, I think, me and Matt actually recorded a podcast on it a couple of days ago, the whole opportunity to travel, to lean into, you said the word challenges, and you see it all as an opportunity, Shade, like, it’s just great. There’s so much growth. And it’s the same for me, I’m taking my daughter for the first time, I haven’t left since pre COVID, you know, overseas or anything like it’s gonna be a whole new experience for me as well. bringing in the travel and all that opportunity with the retreats. But the one thing I will say is that for somebody now that’s hold 15 retreats and 40, 50 workshops, I don’t know how many it’s been anymore. But when somebody returns, you meet it with a different self, you’re coming in from a different vantage point. And it’s a completely different experience. And I get excited when people return, because their skills are further down the track, they understand it more. And then there’s less fear in a way, and they understand how to surrender more. And everyone we’ve done has been completely different, to be honest, because it’s the people that make them. 100% that comes through you know exciting Shay is there any links that you want to share with people or anything can they come and like I don’t know.

Shay (01:01:59):
Yeah, I could share my lymphomaniac page. You know, I’m not, yeah, I’m not the world’s greatest social influencer or lymphfluencer, as I like to say. But you know, I’m finding my feet with it. And there’s actually, by starting the page, there has actually been some women get in touch with me who have not been doing any physical exercise in the last couple of years because of their lymphedema. And they have now started doing things like daily walking again. And I’m like, wow, like I’ve actually inspired that. And that just, yeah, blows my mind. So the more that I can help somebody else with either the cancer, the lymphedema, or going through big, massive life changes through what I’m sharing in my story, then yeah, that, that really fills my cup a hundred percent.

Guy (01:02:49):
Amazing. The ripple effect continues. Yeah. It’s so cool. Well, Shay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I know it’s like another stepping into the unknown, you know, if you haven’t been on one before, but mate, you’re going to support and inspire a lot of people from this conversation today. So I really appreciate it and appreciate you and everything you’re doing. You’re an inspiration.

Shay (01:03:12):
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.

Guy (01:03:15):
You’re welcome. Thank you. See ya.